Wednesday, June 23. 2010

Arctic Opening is a new installation by fabric | ch, curated by Seconde Nature (curatorship: Pierre-Emmanuel Reviron) that we will install next week on the Frioul Islands in Marseille (South of France, Mediterranean Sea), in the context of the Festival MIMI (Festival des musiques innovantes et actuelles).

The installation will be freely accessible to everyone from the 30th of June to the 14th of July and is part of an outdoor exhibition presenting several works of art / experimental architecture (among which Nicolas Reeves, Lee Patterson).

The aim of the project is to let appear a "second day" made of a large artificial ligthing, between Marseille's sunsets and sunrises, when everything becomes dark and quiet on the islands. This illumination will have its source up north, beyond the polar circle, where the sun shines 24 hours long during summer. Thus the continuous day of the arctic summer will be transported to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Arctic Opening will light up a zone of the arid landscape of the Frioul close to an industrial ruin, channeling a fictional catastrophic future of an Arctic Ocean free of ice with the present of this mediterranean island, already surrounded by sea routes and heavy tourism. The result will become a metis landscape, all nights long: an arctic mediterranean, remote day at night.

The overall installation will look a bit like a scientific expedition, with sensing devices and climatic interfaces set up under a tent, which will analyze the polar meteorologic data and control the variations of intensity of Arctic Opening.

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ARCTIC OPENING

Each day, when night falls on our urbanized landscapes in our cities, our streets or our ports, another day dawns, electric. It is literally a "second day" which begins: the one of neon signs, street lights, sodium, mercury or fluorescent lighting, the one of illuminated apartments and shops windows, the one of night activities that we did not know two centuries ago.

Although today we no longer think much about it, as this "second day" is now part of everyday life of city dwellers, this artificial light had been a conquest: by fire first, then by the gas, and more recently by electricity. This "fabricated" light permitted first to extend artificially the day at night to illuminate the darkness, but also to transform our relationship to time, to landscape and to space. It especially allowed to exceed the given natural immemorial cycle of day and night induced by the rotation of the Earth itself, and thus to redefine architectural and urban spaces.

However, that day, which has become "perpetual", has interfered since the nineteenth century with our natural rhythms, producing dramatic changes: emancipated of the natural alternation of day and night, social habits and customs of inhabitants benefiting This "discovery" found themselves immediately and irrevocably transformed. One began to live and work at night, having fun more and more under artificial light, and sometimes, as compensation, to sleep the day away. One also began to design new architectures that did not require natural lighting anymore. In a few decades, artificial lighting profoundly altered the lifestyle of city dwellers, but not only: birds began to sing at night near the lampposts, insects to swarm under the spotlights and stars to disappear of the urban night sky, opening the door to a strange world, that combines natural and artificial cycles. Losses and gains then.

This new environment was also marked by the willingness of men to control the "randomness" or the "wildness" to take control of a growing number of factors and constitutive dimensions of their habitat. Today, this "second day", historically "industrial", is still often a day with a monotone lighting, having essentially a functional goal (to see, to secure, to work, but also to read, to cook, etc..). Mostly, it evokes nothing, and if it varies, it is to stay in a comfort zone preset unlike natural climates which are constantly playing with landscape to offer different uses and perceptions of a same environment. In addition we are just beginning to take the measure of the energy cost of that enterprise and its participation in global ecological negative balance of humanity. Yet this environment, sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing, develops undoubtedly for us a poetry of shifts. Now, the challenge is to deploy these shifts, which combine presents and futures, into a comprehensive reflection on our contemporary space and our consumption of energy.

Designed for the Innovative Music Festival (MIMI 2010) in Marseille, on the Frioul islands, Arctic Opening does not aim to deny this "second day", but to amplify its positive and sensitive issues. Thus, Arctic Opening seeks to develop the potential of imagination(s) of artificial illumination, while integrating new technologies and intelligent lighting cycles of low energy consumption.

In a global environment, endlessly interconnected, which develops new forms of mobility, temporalities, and social behaviours at the crossings of time zones, this artificial day provides an opportunity for another kind of "days", simultaneous and distant: an imaginary or mediated "connection" with countries where precisely and literally, at the same time, the sun is shinning. Through satellite imagery and sensor data, it is now possible to imagine opening a "window" onto a sensitive and remote light whose intensity varies continuously, the sky is sunny, then cloudy, then possibly sunny again. A window "teleporting" abstractly a remote atmosphere without physical mobility, without means of transport other than transportation data from there to here.

With Arctic Opening, fabric | ch proposes to create such an "opening" at a large scale, to another day: an artificial and sensitive light, revealing some geographical patterns, luminous and meteorological, across the globe (to the summer of one hemisphere corresponds the winter of the other, to the daylight the darkness, to the perpetual light of a pole the night of the other, etc.). When night falls over Marseille this "second day" gets up with its source somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the habitable zones (Hammerfest, Murmansk, Prudhoe Bay, Tuktoyaktuk, Igloolik, Clyde River, Scoresby, etc.), where once the ice melted new navigation routes open and will open more and more in the future. Fed by light coming from regions, where in this season, the horizontal light of the sun never sets, where sunrise and sunset mix, Arctic Opening reproduces the continuous modulation of the northern summer. Composed of hundreds of light emitting diodes (LEDs), this bright band long of eighteen meters illuminates a rocky landscape, swept by winds. At sunrise, it goes slowly to reveal a temporary installation of pipes, placed there to conduct this experiment in distant light. Erected near the vicinity of a military and industrial relic of the twentieth century, a tent hosting the instruments of control suggests a possible scientific expedition in an "hostile" zone.

The combination of light produced by this window and the Frioul islands' landscape produces a composite territory: Arctic Mediterranea, remote nocturnal day.

This hybrid area in mixed light is purposely created as a prospective environment, which evokes the contemporary patterns of mobility and crossing time zones, the fluxes and and the networks, the artificiality and the mediatisation, or to indicate the strange topographic similarities between the arid Frioul islands and the Arctic regions where no tree grows. As if this temporary place in front of Marseille, illuminated by a light transported from the Arctic could become the distant, catastrophic and fictitious future of these northern territories: warmed by climatic changes, visited by boats navigating on new routes opened by melting ice, the shores of the Far North could begin to resemble those of the Mediterranean Sea. This environment would then hybridise himself as well, as people become increasingly mobile over time: mix of here and elsewhere, future and present, material and immaterial.

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Note: the MIMI Festival is the occasion to listen to some of the most innovative or profiled musicians in the incredible context of the Frioul Islands. I can for example highly recommend the evening of the 11th of July: Carsten Nicolai a.k.a. Alva Noto in concert with Blixa Bargeld (EinstŁrzende Neubauten). This promises a lot!

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This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.

We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.

Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.

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